We've flipped. Democrats have become the default position in many ways, and conservatives are either outcasts or the cool kids, depending on where you are.
I think this is equally strange to many conservatives who are still attempting to digest this.
When several liberal writers went on tirades regarding how it should be forbidden for people to talk about their sex lives in public, it occurred to me the current liberals were not the ones of my formative years.
People try to dismiss the complaints of the old guard as them being left behind, but that is clearly not the case. As you say, there have been a number of "flips" that are clearly not "progressions". Expanding civil rights from blacks, to gays, to trans, is clearly a progression and no old school Democrat (for example) bats an eye. Speech and sex stand out as clearly having reversed and if you buy into the current ideology then the previous attitudes were wrong, sure. But pretending they extend naturally in the same way as expanding civil rights seems dishonest.
I started my career in the liberal arts and one of the reasons I abandoned them was that they were a poor investment. Physics may have "revolutions" but it always builds on the math of the previous generation if nothing else. Someone who could ace a test in 1930 could do well cold today and learn the quantum stuff relatively quickly. A 1960's feminist is wrong about just about everything according to a modern one and maybe the modern one is indeed right but it just shows that learning about feminism is useless except in as much as you need "right now". There's no future return for investment today.
I think this is equally strange to many conservatives who are still attempting to digest this.
When several liberal writers went on tirades regarding how it should be forbidden for people to talk about their sex lives in public, it occurred to me the current liberals were not the ones of my formative years.